A content marketer, for example, can create a series of blog posts that serve to generate leads from a new ebook the business recently created. The company's social media marketer might then help promote these blog posts through paid and organic posts on the business's social media accounts. Perhaps the email marketer creates an email campaign to send those who download the ebook more information on the company. We'll talk more about these specific digital marketers in a minute.
Influencer marketing is also going to be affected by artificial intelligence. With each year, AI is making the process of finding the right influencers to partner with easier and faster. It’s helping identify those with better engagement, fewer fake followers, and a higher chance of generating a positive return on investment (ROI). In addition, artificial intelligence is transforming influencer marketing in the following ways:
The development of digital marketing, during the 1990s and 2000s, changed the way brands and businesses use technology for marketing.[4] As digital platforms became increasingly incorporated into marketing plans and everyday life,[5] and as people increasingly use digital devices instead of visiting physical shops,[6][7] digital marketing campaigns have become prevalent, employing combinations of search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), content marketing, influencer marketing, content automation, campaign marketing, data-driven marketing,[8] e-commerce marketing, social media marketing, social media optimization, e-mail direct marketing, display advertising, e–books, and optical disks and games have become commonplace. Digital marketing extends to non-Internet channels that provide digital media, such as television, mobile phones (SMS and MMS), callback, and on-hold mobile ring tones.[9] The extension to non-Internet channels differentiates digital marketing from online marketing.
We can expect that Instagram ad spend continues to increase in line with increased usage and better advertising options on the platform. This shift in ad spend is indicated by a Merkle report of their clients' investments that showed that while Facebook ad spend grew 40 percent year over year in Q2 2018, ad spend on Instagram jumped 177 percent during the same time period.
A good example of the commercial impact digital technology and media can have is Dominos. I recently heard about the impact of digitization of Dominos from Dave Wild, their UK CEO at Technology for Marketing / E-commerce Expo. Dominos UK only took its first mobile phone order in 2010 when online sales accounted for less than 30% of revenue. Eight years on, Dominos have a market share of more than 50% with digital transactions accounts for more than 80% of sales and the UK smartphone app accounting for more than two-thirds of those sales.
GetResponse - GetResponse offers email marketing, webinars, landing page creation and marketing automation. Their email marketing services allows businesses to set up auto-responders, advanced analytics, a/b testing, and forms. You can also plan and build individual customer journeys through their marketing automation, with automation segmentation, basket abandonment, and web event tracking.
Make a list of your existing owned content, and rank each item according to what has previously performed best in relation to your current goals. If your goal is lead generation, for example, rank them according to which generated the most leads in the last year. That might be a particular blog post, an ebook, or even a specific page on your website that's converting well.

In 2020, the need for security is only going to heighten as concerns move into the spotlight and more data breaches occur. Both the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California’s Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) emphasize keeping customer data secure. Marketers must put extra focus on how they use cookies when marketing their products and services.

Digital strategist Dr Dave Chaffey is co-founder and Content Director of marketing publisher and learning platform Smart Insights. Dave is editor of the 100+ templates, ebooks and courses in the digital marketing resource library created by our team of 25+ digital marketing experts. Our resources are used by our Premium members in more than 100 countries to Plan, Manage and Optimize their digital marketing. Free members can access our free sample templates here. Dave is a keynote speaker, trainer and consultant who is author of 5 bestselling books on digital marketing including Digital Marketing Excellence and Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice. To learn about my books, see my personal site Digital marketing books by Dr. Dave Chaffey. In 2004 he was recognised by the Chartered Institute of Marketing as one of 50 marketing ‘gurus’ worldwide who have helped shape the future of marketing. Please connect on LinkedIn to receive updates or ask me a question.

Digital marketing planning is a term used in marketing management. It describes the first stage of forming a digital marketing strategy for the wider digital marketing system. The difference between digital and traditional marketing planning is that it uses digitally based communication tools and technology such as Social, Web, Mobile, Scannable Surface.[57][58] Nevertheless, both are aligned with the vision, the mission of the company and the overarching business strategy.[59]

That's exactly how the three can work together to help you meet your goal. Of course, it's not compulsory to use all three. If your owned and earned media are both successful, you might not need to invest in paid. It's all about evaluating the best solution to meet your goal, and then incorporating the channels that work best for your business into your digital marketing strategy.
Google have been prioritizing rich ‘visual search’ snippets across all their platforms and devices, which allow visitors to get all the information they are looking a lot faster and help them decide on the right website to click through, right from the top results. Based on a study conducted by Path Interactive, among people aged between 13 and 18, 40% of them are going to get what they need through rich snippets.
Since Google dominates the results that businesses get from search engine marketing our summary of the search trends here focuses on Google. Carolanne Mangles reported for us back in August on some of the biggest changes Google made in 2018, many of which will be deployed and evolve in 2019. The most obvious change is the launch of the Google Marketing Platform which saw AdWords renamed to Ads and the Doubleclick ad platform and analysis tools like Google Analytics, Data Studio, and AB testing through data studio more tightly integrated.
By populating its YouTube channel with user-made video content, GoPro has encouraged an entire fanbase of outdoorspeople to take amazing footage of their adventures and post it online -- often with credit back to GoPro. This ongoing digital marketing campaign has championed the use of video to spread the word about the GoPro product line -- and a lot of the content is created by the customers themselves.
Influencer marketing has evolved into to become more personalized. As it becomes more authentic, 92 percent of people trust other consumer recommendations over corporate advertising. For this reason, marketers from a leading gaming company launched their highly successful influencer marketing campaign #Superlord on the social video app TikTok, which took Germany by storm:
Off page SEO: This type of SEO focuses on all of the activity that takes place "off the page" when looking to optimize your website. "What activity not on my own website could affect my ranking?" You might ask. The answer is inbound links, also known as backlinks. The number of publishers that link to you, and the relative "authority" of those publishers, affect how highly you rank for the keywords you care about. By networking with other publishers, writing guest posts on these websites (and linking back to your website), and generating external attention, you can earn the backlinks you need to move your website up on all the right SERPs.
Businesses should also focus their outreach efforts on using voice engine optimization. Marketers must use a more natural language SEO to create content accordingly. This requires them to think what their target audience may use in their voice queries as well as focus on long-tail keywords because searchers are likely to be more specific when asking a question. For instance, in one question, a shopper may request information about time, price, location and other details which sound heavy for written search queries.
For that reason, you're probably less likely to focus on ‘leads' in their traditional sense, and more likely to focus on building an accelerated buyer's journey, from the moment someone lands on your website, to the moment that they make a purchase. This will often mean your product features in your content higher up in the marketing funnel than it might for a B2B business, and you might need to use stronger calls-to-action (CTAs).
Marketers are therefore looking for consolidated tools and out of the box campaigns, which can be deployed with few clicks. A templated campaign can include a couple of landing pages, ready forms, data tracking and workflow with all its messages, created based on campaign goals, such as a paid ad campaign. With this capability, marketers can cut down time, decrease cost and focus on improving their content versus doing redundant work.
Since Google dominates the results that businesses get from search engine marketing our summary of the search trends here focuses on Google. Carolanne Mangles reported for us back in August on some of the biggest changes Google made in 2018, many of which will be deployed and evolve in 2019. The most obvious change is the launch of the Google Marketing Platform which saw AdWords renamed to Ads and the Doubleclick ad platform and analysis tools like Google Analytics, Data Studio, and AB testing through data studio more tightly integrated.
Here we'll take a look at a few of the best tools for personalization integrated with web analytics, Saas for ecommerce and personalization features available as part of CMS or commerce management systems. For the full list of recommended personalization software tools, check out Dr. Dave Chaffey's post 28 Website Personalization and Recommendations Software Tools.

To reinforce a more personalized manifestation of sending engagement-based emails, an obvious direction is resurfacing again: plain text emails. This sends those engagement-based emails in a more individualized and hand-crafted way to the targeted user, which gives a more personalized aspect to the communicated piece. Moreover, because HTML style emails containing detailed graphics may increase the potential for spam, marketers are considering plain texts as alternative ways to minimize this problem. Besides, plain text emails address the need of the user and improve the engagement rate.

#1 Content marketing - this has featured consistently in the top 3 for several years. I think it's number 1 since content marketing can be applied by all types of business regardless of their sector or size and if the right strategy is followed can make an impact that supports communications across all touchpoint of the customer lifecycle. It fuels all digital channels from search, email and social media marketing. This makes having a defined content marketing strategy essential to competing in many sectors.
Tweetdeck - This is great for monitoring Hashtags. If you don't want to pay for social media scheduling software like Buffer or Hootsuite, Tweetdeck also allows you to manually schedule in Tweets (Facebook also has it's on scheduling feature) but it's great to have one tool that scheduling in social content across all your available social channels.